Elif Batuman Quotes
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Lists are based on realism - on the coldly contemplated finitude of resources.
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Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time,' especially 'Time Regained,' made me think differently about what the novel is and can do. Then I forgot about it, then reread it and remembered again.
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'Constructed Worlds' comes from a novel draft that I wrote in my early twenties and reread/revised only in my late thirties.
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To think of Tolstoy eating a sandwich is intrinsically kind of funny.
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Read enough about the dung beetle, and a picture of its character emerges: patient, optimistic, uncomplaining.
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The first thing I tried to write was a novel, when I took that time off in grad school. Then I didn't finish it. I went back to school, and then I started writing nonfiction kind of by accident.
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For much of my adult life, I believed, inaccurately, that I knew the story of Charles Dickens's 'A Christmas Carol' - that I remembered it from childhood.
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I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they were.
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As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained.
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From an early age, my favorite thing to read was novels. For years, when I was writing only nonfiction, still I was reading almost exclusively novels. It's weird to be producing something that you don't consume. It feels really alienating.
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Tolstoy didn't know about steampunk or cyborgs, but he did know about the nightmarishness of steam power, unruly machines, and the creepy half-human status of the Russian peasant classes. In 'Anna Karenina,' nineteenth-century life itself is a relentless, relentlessly modern machine, flattening those who oppose it.
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Being in a heterosexual relationship for a woman is always implicitly a little bit humiliating.
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'Awkward' implies both solidarity and implication. Nobody is exempt.
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I had wanted to write 'The Possessed' as fiction, but everyone told me that no one would read a novel about graduate students. It seems almost uncivilized to tell someone writing a novel, 'No, you have to call this a memoir.'